Pizza-sized holes: Americans want to supersize the cup on golf greens

Max Davidson

Oh dear, oh dear. Americans just don't get it, do they? From the land of the winner, where losing is for wimps, comes news of one of the silliest ideas in years - expanding the size of golf holes from the traditional four and a quarter inches (10.8cm) to fifteen inches (38cm), the width of a pizza.

Golf, it seems, is becoming less popular in the States, with the "difficulty" of the game cited as one of the main reasons. You can see what's happened. Kids have a few lessons, learn to spank the ball 200 metres down the fairway, then wonder why they end up shooting 40 over par. Answer: because they drop so many shots on the greens, trying to find the bottom of those fiddly little cups. So if you expand the cups...

It is the logic of the madhouse but, incredibly, 15-inch holes are being installed at about 100 courses across the US as part of a pilot scheme. This follows an event in Georgia earlier this month at which the larger holes were used. Those taking part included the European Ryder Cup star Sergio Garcia, who thought they might speed up play and appeal to younger players.

Garcia is one of the most likeable sportsmen around. He has never won a Major, but he would have had the 2007 Open at Carnoustie if his 10ft putt on the final hole had not lipped out, so he has more cause than most to rue the size of the hole which the Royal and Ancient Golf Club set as standard in 1893. But he must know in his heart that, if you take the fear of missing humiliatingly short putts out of golf, you take away its soul.

One of life's most humbling experiences: Sergio Garcia lines up a putt. Photo: Getty Images

Like every golfer who has ever played the game, I have found myself standing knock-kneed over putts so short that a grasshopper could have pushed the ball into the hole - then missed, as my heart started pounding and my hands shaking. The yips, as golfers know them, have affected far better players than me, including top professionals such as Bernhard Langer. They are golf's equivalent of the emotional paralysis that grips a footballer when he steps up to take a penalty in the shoot-out on which his nation's hopes are riding. Cruel, yes. But in the alchemy of professional sport, a necessary cruelty.

If Tiger Woods holed every putt within 10ft - as he would, if 15-inch holes were introduced - the game would be very dull. It is the fact that the best golfers in the world can, and often do, miss putts that a child of six could sink that makes the game so fascinating.

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In their very public humiliation, one can glimpse a deeper moral - the same moral the gods of cricket dispense when they contrive for the best batsman in the world to get out first ball and make the long lonely walk back to the pavilion. Nobody is too big to fail, and fail ignominiously. On that eternal truth, the sanity of the planet rests.

P G Wodehouse, a keen amateur golfer, once joked: "I attribute the insane arrogance of the later Roman emperors almost entirely to the fact that, never having played golf, they never knew that strangely chastening humility which is engendered by a topped chip-shot." Or, as he might have put it, a foozled putt.

Wodehouse did not take life too seriously, but he would have been appalled at the thought of golfers putting into holes the size of dinner plates, just to spare their blushes. And he would have been right.

The proponents of 15-inch golf holes are the American equivalent of those sensitive English roses who want to ban competitive sports in schools because losing is so beastly for little Emma.

They should be hurled into the long rough and given a two-stroke penalty.